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Articles in Remarkable People(45)

Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-running, continually maintained AI systems in history.Read More

Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to develop and market CP/M, which for years was the dominant operating system for personal microcomputers. Thousands of programs were written to run under it, and a million or more people might have used it.Read More

David T. Morgenthaler (August 5, 1919–June 17, 2016) was a towering figure in the first generation of global technology venture capitalists. From the time he entered the field at the age of 48, until his death on June 17, 2016, at the age of 96, Morgenthaler led $3 billion of investments in more than 300 companies.Read More

On April 16, 2016, Silicon Valley’s most influential technologists traded in their signature jeans and hoodies for suits and gowns as they joined technology leaders, innovators, and visionaries from around the world at the Computer History Museum for its 2016 Fellow Awards.Read More

Andrew S. Grove was a seminal figure in the history of the semiconductor industry, and in the story of high-technology industry in Silicon Valley. He passed away on March 21st, 2016. Born in Hungary in 1936, Grove faced, and overcame, profound challenges: A Jewish child who survived German and then Soviet occupations, a young student with significant hearing loss, and a young man during the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He treated the experiences of his early life in a memoir, Swimming Across.Read More

Sixty years ago, on February 14, 1956, two remarkable people addressed a luncheon for scientists, educators and the press at San Francisco’s Hotel St. Francis. One of the speakers would become one of the most successful businessmen and respected philanthropists of his generation. The other would go on to win a Nobel Prize, yet die in infamy.Read More

The Fellow Awards are a long-standing tradition at the Computer History Museum, dating back to 1987 when the Museum inducted its very first Fellow, computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper. The Fellow Awards are an opportunity for the Museum to celebrate the heroes of computing—men and women who have made major contributions to the computer and software-driven world in which we all live.Read More

The rise of TTL to dominate the IC logic business established a pattern familiar to observers of the semiconductor industry with its succession of DRAM, Microprocessor, and Flash “Wars.” Battles for supremacy for their products raged for years between all major suppliers on technical features, manufacturing cost, and marketing fronts.Read More

Moore’s “Law” is not a law of nature or science but an observation by Gordon E. Moore, Director of the Fairchild Semiconductor Research and Development Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA in 1965 that evolved over the years and emerged as one of the most familiar maxims in techdom.Read More